VIA releases dual-core Nano X2 CPU and EPIA-M900 Mini-ITX motherboard

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At long last, some 18 months after its last Nano chip, VIA has released a follow-up — and a rather sexy accompanying motherboard. The chip itself is the first in the X2 E-Series of Nano chips, which straps together two of last-last year’s 3000-series Isaiah cores. It’s still a low-power component with a TDP around 5 watts, and it’s still targeted at embedded applications and home theater equipment. Beyond doubling up on cores, some tweaks have presumably been made to architecture since the 3000-series’s launch in 2009, but the exact specifications have not yet been released.

As far as clock speeds go, there’s the option of either 1.4GHz or 1.6GHz — but considering last season’s Nano chips could be clocked to 2GHz, that’s not incredibly exciting. The X2 is a native 64-bit chip, which certainly sets it apart from the Atom — but the 2008 and 2009 Nano chips were 64-bit, too. The X2 also has built-in hardware-based AES encryption and x86 virtualization, two technologies that leave Intel and Atom in the dust — but again, those have always been present on the Isaiah core. Really, the only new thing is that the X2 has two cores.

On the motherboard side of things, the EPIA-M900 certainly delivers on features. Thanks to the juicy VX900 northbridge and the ChromotionHD video engine, there’s hardware acceleration for VC-1 (Blu-ray) and H.264, and enough power to support 1080p playback without hitting the CPU. There’s no sign of whether any kind of DirectX or OpenGL is supported, though. On the backplate there’s Gigabit LAN, four USB 2.0 ports, HDMI and VGA ports, and even a serial port — and on the motherboard itself, there are single PCIe x16 and PCI slots, and lots of headers for all of the usual stuff, including SPDIF.

Now… what we really need is some benchmarks, but there are none! The top-of-the-line 3000-series, released in November 2009, was about 40% faster than the original Atom N270, which was released in June 2008 — and Intel has come a long way since then. The VIA press release certainly seems to emphasize that the X2 will be ideal for embedded, kiosk-type applications — and the fact that pre-release units haven’t been sent to hardware sites for benchmarking would suggest that the X2 isn’t going to be that exciting in the raw grunt department.

Still, with a TDP that’s similar to the Atom, native 64-bit support, and a plethora of other baked-in hardware-accelerated features, the EPIA-M900 and Nano X2 certainly make an attractive pairing for HTPCs. One fly in the ointment, however: the combination has a suggested retail price of $310. A brand-new Atom with a decent motherboard, on the other hand, can be had for around $150.

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